Tag Archives: purpose

Looking Back at Years of Writing

I seek an answer in the shadow of these years spent wandering and lost; in crumpled notebook pages that mark a trail of desperation and precocious notions, sex-crazed teenage dreams stained with cigarette ash and the half-mad scrawl of an anguished and lonely soul wanting only to belong to something worth belonging to, something real. I see behind these quaint reminders that the poet I have become has been now thirty years in the making — even at nine years old there were signs of a kind of infectious madness. Believe me, I have dissected my own work over the years with a sharper scalpel that any high-priced psychiatrist could possibly envision.

There is something that draws me to this earlier incarnation. Something that is antithetical to that which can be defined as an American experience. The experience garnered by growing up in America. That experience is the preponderence of ambition and the absolute lack of lofty ambition.

To give oneself without question or pause to a life of the mind, in a nation that worships the life of the body, to produce, to commerce, to practicality. That is the madness that I see forming in myself at an early age. The curse of having read, by the time I was 12, of the history of the entire world without having the limiting prejudice of American interests being of foremost importance. To wonder, at age 10 or so, what the Native Americans really thought of Columbus, echoed perhaps by Flip Wilson’s line “and the Indians paid not much attention to Chris and his boatload of Spaniards, being busy celebrating ‘Not Having Been Discovered Yet’ day…”

I search the landscape of the American mind, and I find no great philosophy to unify the innermost spiritual quest of mankind, but rather Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney — inventors of practicum to make this world, not the next, the happy hunting ground.

And I wonder about Thomas Jefferson. The line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Certainly, it can be intepreted to mean that all humans are created, that is conceived in the same manner — in fact, in the exact manner of any of the mammalian species — by the coupling of a male and female of that same species for the purpose of generating offspring. In that sense, yes, they are created equal. Yet, beyond that simple act of conception, there is no real equality. And it is not that act that gives life — as there are obvious and numerous examples of human coitus that do not result in fertilization. Life is something else altogether; not bestowed by human parents, but rather by a cooperative massing of the energy of the universe into a particular manifestation. Once that manifestation announces itself vocally, it is indeed for the intents and purposes of reincarnation, alive. At any time prior it could, with the cooperation of universal energies beyond the scope of human manipulation, cancel its current mission and await a more fortuitous venture. But that is another point, altogether. As Krishna said to Arjuna at a critical juncture, when Arjuna was bewailing his required task of slaughtering countless relations and other worthy soldiers … you can no more in reality end their lives than you can create them anew. True life and death are beyond your control; you are merely an agent for forces outside your mortal comprehension. But back to the creation of equals. Certainly, in the studies of genetics that have been pursued since the time of Jefferson, it is clear that the concept of equality at creation is slightly in error. Genetics give one a stooped back, receding hairline, penchance for physicality, prediliction for speech, brain size shape and characteristics. Certainly creation as equals requires equals as parents. But that is another story.

Enough of this for now. I will return to this theme later.

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On Writing

Why is that writers — and it doesn’t matter which writer you choose — at some point in their chosen vocation end up writing about writing? And why do non-writers see that as so unusual, so self-centered and ultimately circular? You don’t question a saint immersed in their version of divinity that can only talk rationally (well, can talk at any rate) about God. LIkewise, philosophers love nothing better than to talk, discourse, put to paper in thousand-page tomes, those thoughts that ellucidate their love of knowledge. Granted, in all these cases, the conversation is limited by the frame-of-reference of the listener on one side, and more importantly, by the frame-of-reference of the speaker or writer on the other side. Writers write about writing because that’s who they are, that is their morphology, their modus operandi. Project managers look at things from the framework, the guidelines, of project management — efficiency, elimination of redundant information, structure and reporting relationships — as a tool to hone their own basis for evaluating life in terms of budget, schedule and quality. Of all the great characters of Fiction, most if not writers themselves of Poetry or Fiction to some degree, at least are prodigious letter writers. They have a need, or rather, the writer creating them, has a need to extend their own meager gitts into tangential relationship with a world that is more or less under their control. Granted, if you ascribe to the belief that all life is pre-ordained, that we choose our parents, our upbringing, our vocation and ultimately our destination, it’s as if the book has already been written — but there is no skipping ahead chapters, or skimming through to the end to see what happens, in the book of life. We are fated, if by nothing else, to the turning of pages one at a time, chapter by chapter, one single word lain in line with a countless stream of those that have come before, and those that will follow.

In that sense, I suppose, the writer, over all other occupations save for the marytr or saint, has a more distinct advantage to many others. A painter, for example, who tries to talk about painting using painting itself is likely to be swamped in a surreal, imagist, dada world that contains a dangerous degree of self-similarity. Likewise, the Musician, who tries to convey their thoughts about Music in the idiom of Music must limit themselves to communicating in this way to those who are also Musicians, and actually, that are Musicians of the same order as themselves. The saint has a more direct line of approach, in that particularly in the monotheistic traditions, there are only two goals at the outset of the path — to become a saint, like themselves, or a minister. To do, or to preach. All other positions are like half-way houses on the road to salvation, and are not among the prescribed courses outlined so nebulously in their Great Books. There is no place in the structure of religion for those who require others to cajole them into action. The very act of salvation demands much more of the indiividual that passive participation. The writer, like the saint, relies upon something greater than themselves to prove their point for them — and in both cases, it is the Word.

So much is determined by the words we experience during our childhood, during early education, in the books we read (or don’t read). To not have a word for something is to exclude that concept from your worldview. Because to live life, you’ve got to read from the Book of Life — except this book has not yet been written, so far as you know, because you are only capable of glimpsing perhaps a paragraph or two ahead. Most of the text is hidden, by the page you’ve just flipped past, or by the unknown vast number of pages yet to be turned.

The different between the saint and the writer, then, is that sense of co-creation. The saint waits patiently for the next page to be revealed by the Author to which they owe allegiance, devote their lives to the understanding of. The writer, on the other hand, sees the next page as a challenge that must be shaped, crafted; not reliant upon an external source to provide the entertainment, the knowledge, the insight and character development. Writing, then, is a pagan religion. It is about power-with, not power-over.

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Playing the Blues Again

When you play the blues,
at some point,
you’ve got to decide.

Whether to play around the issue,
like Charlie Parker,
flitting in and out just hinting at the melody,
giving subtle suggestions
on the point you’re trying to make
but usually ending up burning out
to some tangent
at the far reaches
of reality;
or like B.B. King,
solid,
making up the melody as you go along,
the result of the mere fact
that your confident fingers
are making the strings move
“a little something,”
no
“exactly” like this,
creating in the moment,
at the speed of now
the counterpoint
against which the chords themselves
are measured and never found wanting.

What it comes down to,
ultimately, is what you don’t choose
to say,
the space you leave between the notes,
the way your sentences leave your lips —
like staggering, happy drunks or
like sober fools discussing semantics or
liike a kiss that promises more
a kiss, as Satchmo sang,
to build a dream on.

Of course,
there’s another decision you need to make first.
There is a juncture in your life as a Musician
(or in the Music of your living),
a crossroads to which you come
like Robert Johnson,
running from back doorstep
of one jealous cuckolding woman
to another
(lying with your eyes
while your hands are busy working
overtime)
and it’s not so much that you decide
to sell your soul to the Devil,
or pick the mistress whose cooking
is better,
even if the other’s goose
lays the golden egg.

When you’re standing at the crossroads
if you take a step in any direction
you pick from among unknowns,
strange shadows of possibility
that can only suggest.

Because faith is inhale
and doubt is exhale
part of the same flow of
stale, cigarette- and whiskey-stained air
that creeps into your clothes
and under your fingernails
stretching out your lungs in wild gasps,
the choice is not between
heaven and hell
good and evil
black and white
sanity and madness
rich and poor.

It’s about trusting yourself
even though you know you don’t
know nothing.

And that’s the secret
of playing the blues,
whether you want to tell the world about it,
or simply flash hints of the light
you’re hiding under a barrel;

either way, you make it sound
like it’s the first time
you ever played it,

but you’ve been listening
long enough
to know what to say.

20 MAY 2004

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Two Poets Lament, Part II

Perhaps the world is full of verse that fails,
inspiring none to act as heroes should;
and in frustration, lesser poets rail
against the confine and form of the good,
their self-aggrandized talents gone to waste
that they alone lament through sleepless nights
spent in a fruitless embrace of the chaste.
Would you have these sad wingless souls take flight?

These small words, you decry, may do no more
than taunt at nestlings yet to try their wings,
but to deny that role is to ignore
that first one dreams, and then one does, a thing.
The truest poet weaves philosophy
of the imagination into every phrase;
and in the face of man’s catastrophes
breathes new life into dark and bitter days.

So what if critics jibe and treat with scorn
the works that such a writer may produce?
For they, unlike the poet, are not born
but made – and made to work to prove their use
comparing one illusion to the next,
and in the vacuum of the known, resigned
to observation, that at best, reflects
a too swift movement through their time.

But poets are to blame, as well, for this;
they seek outside themselves for themes and signs,
believing the self-created, wild hubris
they use to justify a state of mind
too pure for common purposes or deeds,
accepting, without question, some great cause
in which they have no role or fate or need
except to garner temporal applause.

10 MAY 2004

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Dada

Art for art’s sake? Some mad Protestant Hell:
give glory to gods too quick dethroned,
the crowds that crowned them discharged early
and now gone home,
their purpose found too soon,
before they grew strong.

Without any message, pure art, placed alone,
not impeded by method or philosophy,
no subconscious symbolist message conveyed;
has any such work ever been shown?

The portrayal of struggle, when experienced second-hand
through books, and paintings, and endless streams
of made-for-television movies,
simulcasts of refugees,
on-the-scene reports
and cameras no longer hidden,
cannot help but pose an inference or two,
even against the observer’s better judgment.

All things serve some purpose.

Those that last, that affect real change in the world?
The few that have a chance of achieving longevity
in a world obsessed with fifteen second sound bytes
find that purpose outside themselves.

No thing that exists for its own self alone
really exists.

It has no beginning.
It has no end.
It has no time.
It has no place.

It must be God.

06 MAY 2004

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An April Morning: anglo-saxon prosody with a bob and wheel

The sky was shot with grays and greens,
and clinging clouds that hung low;
from the west, the wind was slight
against my face that April night
     when first
     I found I’d lost my way;
     and more, what’s worse,
     with nothing left to say:
     a writer’s sad curse.

I stood in silence, stunned and mute
and watched the world continue on;
Despite my dumbness, nothing changed
in how life lumbers slowly on
      and stops
      for no one, rich or poor;
      both thieves and cops
      react, and nothing more,
      as each moment drops.

For quite a while, I watched and waited,
’til the lights lowered and dawn was near,
as the darkened earth began to glow
with the soft shimmer of newborn day
      and awoke
      stretching its tired limbs,
      the spell of gloom broken
      by a small bird’s hymn.
      And only then, I spoke.

06 APR 2004

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A Blessing for the Road: a benison or blessing

I’ve asked much from the universe,
expecting, like a child,
that forces outside my control,
untamed, feral and wild,

would take a hand, and mold my life
in ordered, simple ways.
Such is the expectation
of most people, when they pray.

But my petition now has changed;
I listen, more than speak,
and hope for nothing sure, except
reminders where I’m weak.

The universe can bless or curse;
to me, they are the same.
Just tests from different teachers,
with only myself to blame.

Again, I ask the universe
to contemplate my role,
and where required, make changes
that may benefit the whole.

Much more than that, I cannot ask,
nor really, do I need,
except a blessing to move at
a self-determined speed.

04 APR 2004

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